


sold my soul to a three-piece

by aguntoaknifefight (Lilith_Child)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Asexual Character, Compulsion, Consent Issues, M/M, Masturbation, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 08:20:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17019111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilith_Child/pseuds/aguntoaknifefight
Summary: “If you are to be the Archivist, which you are, you do need to have some degree of control over your abilities. You want this knowledge; I need to be able to rely on you.”Unlike Gertrude,he didn’t add. “So learn.Ask me again.”Or: Elias is willing to let Jon compel him, and Jon might be in over his head.





	sold my soul to a three-piece

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Hold Me Down" by Halsey.

"Ask me again," Elias said, breaking the silence. 

Jon blinked. “What?” He hadn’t really been expecting an answer — deep down, in the spaces behind his ribs and between his vertebrae, he already Knew — and had only asked to be thorough. To feed the twin desires to Know and to irritate Elias. (Because a _month,_ really!)

Elias sighed, conveying upon Jon that he was doing him some great honor by _doing his job_ and explaining his thought process. “If you are to be the Archivist, which you are, you do need to have _some_ degree of control over your abilities. You want this knowledge; I need to be able to rely on you.” _Unlike Gertrude,_ he didn’t add. “So learn. _Ask me again._ ” 

It wasn’t quite a threat, but it was definitely a test. It was a loose thread Elias knew Jon couldn’t help but pull on. He thought of a gun and a pipe; the dark copper stain of unanswered questions gaping wide under his office rug. 

He imagined knowing.

Jon swallowed, a little dizzy as the sudden possibilities blossomed before him. _This is a bad idea,_ the sensible part of his mind whispered, but Jon had been ignoring that voice for years and was well-practiced at it. _Elias has information,_ the larger part of his mind insisted. _He knows what you should know._

And really, in the end, they both knew what Jon was going to choose. 

_Knowledge above everything,_ he told himself; an old, old instinct only recently put into words. So he took another breath, eyes fixed on Elias’s sharp, smug smile — and committed.

Elias sat down. Jon didn’t. At his sides, his hands clenched into fists.

He wasn’t quite sure how compulsion actually worked. He didn’t even know how long he’d had the ability, let alone how long he’d been using it, so there wan’t much of a reference frame for him to draw from. Other than Jude and Mike’s reactions, that was, which weren’t exactly what he was hoping for from Elias. Still, he tried to imagine it as something like a - vocal mouse trap, for lack of a better term. The proverbial fly-catching honey.

There was no hesitation in his voice when he asked, “Elias. Am I human?” He tired to put as much persuasion in his voice as he could, but Elias only twitched. It was a deliberate, infuriating movement. He was still smiling. His smile actually seemed wider, if possible. Jon wanted to punch him.

“What are you really asking me?” 

Jon flexed his jaw and exhaled sharply. “What am I? And what do you _know_?” he bit out, more force behind the words than he had intended. Elias’s breath stuttered, as if he’d been hit by a sudden impact, but his eyes stayed open. 

His voice was still perfectly level when he spoke. “Jon.” His tone was reproachful, but lurking just beneath it was amusement. And beneath _that_ was a flicker of something else that Jon couldn’t quite put a name to. Angry resentment rose in his throat, thick and hot. Even in this situation, leaving himself open and vulnerable to Jon, Elias’s control was total. 

“Again,” Elias told him, “and please do try this time, Jon."

He imagined reaching out to grab Elias’s face. Imagined feeling the bones shift and splinter under his fingers, and not pulling his hand away until it was covered with tacky knowledge. Pulling out Elias’ secrets like strips of taffy until there was nothing left to him but an empty suit. Did Elias even have a real body? Or was he like Michael, made of nothing but power and fear?

“Jon,” Elias said again, calm and firm, and Jon forced his mind away from the image. Elias was standing in front of him now, squeezing Jon’s Desolation-branded hand. His grip was tight, nearly painful. The nerve endings in the melted flesh were dulled, but Jon could feel phantom heat sparking up it like electricity all the same. There was a maddening hint of _concern_ in Elias’ eyes. How sweet.

He pulled his hand away, scowling and slid his tongue along the smooth enamel of his teeth. Elias sat back down, angled so Jon could see him. He indicated the chair opposite as he did. “Try again,” Elias ordered.

Jon sat reluctantly, telling himself he didn’t care enough to resist, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he heard the distinct whirr of the activated tape recorder. When had it turned on? Elias gave no indication that he had moved, just sat watching Jon steadily.

Still, the sound filled him with certainty, and he suddenly knew what he must do. He focused on the drive deep within him to _know_ that flooded through every part of himself that he didn’t want to acknowledge. He could feel the concept of himself-as-Jon slip away. It wasn’t forceful, but the tugging was persistent, and eventually all the messy chunks of his self slid away in the inexorable tide. The craving for knowledge welled out and upward like a shallow cut, filling in the distant places where his sense of being should be.

“Elias,” he asked, and now he could feel the dizzying, honeyed static wrapped around the words as he spoke them, “what am I becoming?”

Elias’s posture loosened, and he shivered, breath coming shallower. His eyes fluttered shut for a moment. As they did, Jon could feel the the itchy sensation of being watched coming at him from every direction. It pressed down on him as a buzzing mantle, scratching towards the secrets at his core. 

If he was less distant from his body, Jon might describe the sensation as similar to being flayed. But he didn’t feel broken down and categorized. The scrutiny only felt _right_ in an inexpressible way, if distracting from his present goal. 

It should terrify him. Instead, it made his blood sing.

Elias held out for twenty-seven seconds — Jon waited patiently, and didn’t have to count — before jerking forward and gasping, “the Archivist.” His breathing was ragged, loud against the weighted silence. There was a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Jon felt very far away when he demanded, “What does that mean?”

Elias was slumped back into his chair, the usual stiff line of his spine ruined. He held out for barely eight seconds. Jon’s fingers trembled. “You serve our Master. You are to - become _more,_ Jon. You compel, you categorize. You wear the Watcher’s Crown to remake the world, and you are _glorious_ for it.”

Elias’s lips were parted, and he was staring at Jon with the type of devotion Jon suspected he usually reserved solely for the Beholding. He was not lying.

“The Watcher’s Crown?”

“The - the ritual for Beholding,” he said, and there was no pause, but Elias snarled as the words left his mouth.

Jon could feel a shudder of what — at any other time — would be fear running up his spine. It was what he has been expecting, but to hear it spoken aloud was somehow worse. He swallowed down the emotion rising high in his throat, trying to choke him, and instead focused on Elias. His hands were clenched on the armrests of his chair, and he was shuddering minutely at the residual static running through his bloodstream. 

The fear had brought more of himself-as-Jon back, but he could still feel the quicksilver-steel of the compulsion curling in his throat, ready to be used. Jon was acutely aware of being watched, of the sharp weight pressing into and dissecting him. 

Elias was watching him. _All_ of Elias was watching him. Jon filed that away for later as potentially useful in the inevitable confrontation. But in the here and now, Elias looked debauched. He looked like Jon took him apart — stripped him of his knowledge piece by piece, using nothing but his voice. 

Elias’s hips jerked up, once, against empty air.

There was a deep, primal satisfaction curled at the base of Jon’s spine, and he pressed his advantage. He could hear an echo of Elias’s smug amusement in his own voice, and though hated himself a little for it, it wasn’t enough to stop. “Are you getting off on this?” 

It should be embarrassing. Normally, Jon would be stammering and guilty by this point. Instead, there was nothing but a ferocious pleasure in him when Elias bit out _“yes.”_

Jon could do nothing but watch him, entranced. He wanted to see Elias come apart from what Jon was doing to him. He wanted to make Elias something close to human, something breakable. And he wanted to _know._

He wanted to know how Elias looked when he wasn’t being preternaturally immaculate, when he was doing something so human as this. Jon wanted to categorize every little detail — every shudder, every noise, the whole range of eyes on him — and store it away in his own private Archive.

“Touch yourself,” Jon ordered. There was no compulsion in the words, or at least he didn’t think there was. He was fairly sure it only worked with questions.

Still, Elias let out an acquiescing groan and unbuttoned his suit pants. He didn’t pull them off. Instead, he slid his hand into his underwear. His eyes were closed with a calculated deliberateness, but he was still watching Jon from a thousand points in the room. His skin tingled with it. Jon wasn’t sure he could move right now even if he wanted to.

Slowly, Elias dropped his head back, exposing his neck. The sudden, deliberate vulnerability of it made Jon flush. He dropped his gaze, trying to ignore the hard line of his cock against his leg. He didn’t touch himself. He knew, somehow, that Elias would stop if he did. Sexual gratification wasn’t the point of this.

Elias let out a deliberate noise, more irritated than aroused, and it drew Jon’s attention up from the floor and back to him. His eyes were open. “Watch,” Elias ordered him. Despite the frilled edges to it, his voice was authoritative and absolute. His fingers were moving in a circular motion around his clit, and there was a dull flush high on his cheeks. He was only slightly breathless. 

Jon suddenly felt pinned open by Elias’s scrutiny, like a butterfly under a microscope. His mouth was dry. His tongue felt thick, and the metal lines of the compulsion in his throat had rusted away to nothing. How many times had he watched _Jon_ do this?

Helpless to do anything else, Jon watched, trembling. Elias didn’t speak again, and the only sounds he made were near silent intakes of breath. The tape recorder whirred in the heavy air, and Jon thought about entering this tape into the Archives, available to his assistants and researchers and anyone else with the proper credentials. Sweat prickled on his back.

Jon knew he was blushing, and could feel his breath coming faster than it should. He watched Elias’s fingers curl under the thin fabric of his pants and shuddered. He was caught. Jon imagined wrapping his tongue around him, on his knees before Elias as Elias fucked his mouth indulgently. He wanted to know what Elias would taste like. Jon’s own hands dug tightly into the padding of his chair. He felt distantly dizzy. He couldn’t hear anything but the blood rushing in his ears.

When Elias came, it was with a shudder. Jon felt an intense surge of flaying exposure so total that for a moment it was as if he had been unmade completely. As if he had been unwritten from existence. 

Then the feeling was gone, leaving Jon reeling as he tried to figure out what happened and where it went. Time went sideways, but what felt like a very long and yet short time later, the usual Archives-level surveillance returned. It was at the normal intensity, digging into his joints and the gaps of his scars but no further. 

Elias was standing, Jon put together, his pants buttoned and suit smoothed out. He was rubbing his hands together as he stood at his desk. A sharp smell emanated from it. Hand sanitizer, Jon realized after a moment. His head felt odd. There was a distant ringing in his ears and his throat felt raw. The tape had stopped. 

“Ah, Jon,” Elias said, when he noticed that Jon was - awake? Did he pass out? The dull, pulsing headache at the base of his skull would lend itself to that impression, but it didn’t feel right. Elias cut off Jon as he tried to speak. “No, don’t speak, you’ll hurt your throat. That was rather more…intense than I had anticipated, I’m afraid.”

Jon frowned at him. There was a glint in Elias’s eye that told him that everything had gone _exactly_ as Elias had expected. Jon pushed himself up from the chair, and that was when he realized that he had come. Had it been before or after Elias? It didn’t really seem to matter, now that his legs were sticky and it was starting to dry on his skin.

Elias handed him a pack of travel-sized Kleenexes, smiling. “I’ll just use the bathroom, thanks,” Jon told him, trying for sardonic but missing it completely as his voice frizzled out. He coughed, putting his hand to his throat. He thought he might taste blood. Elias raised an amused eyebrow but relented, and Jon started to categorize the visual differences between them. 

Elias had completely put himself back together, while Jon could feel dried sweat on his skin and come on his legs. He very obviously looked like he just had sex. And smelled like it too, he realized, growing hot with a dull anger. 

“How much of that was real?” he snapped at Elias, ignoring the way his throat scraped over the words, telling him to stop. He thought back to the categorized memories, and could now see the slightly glossy, manufactured tint to them. To Elias’s exposed and unmarked neck. Jon’s pulse was fluttering in his throat, and he swallowed thickly around it.

“Enough,” Elias told him dismissively, with the same condescending yet assessing gaze. “Do you understand your role better now, Jon? What you are becoming?” 

Jon thought of the bottomless craving to know, the separation of his self — the absolute, consuming desire for and pleasure of knowledge, the strange lack of embarrassment and guilt, even now — and said no.

Elias just smirked at him. He ejected the cassette from the recorder with the same hand he had used to - Jon blushed, scowling and cursing himself for it as he did. Elias waited until Jon rolled his eyes and thrust out his hand. Only then did he deign to press it into his palm. “Then maybe this will give you a little clarity,” the bastard said.

Jon shoved it into his pocket without looking at it, and ignored it for the rest of the day. He thought about destroying it. He knew he never could. 

Instead, Jon took it home with him. He sat on the edge of his bed, fingers curled tightly over the hard wood, and hit play.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything in four years but I'm actually kind of proud of this?


End file.
